Apple’s lost iPhone goes primetime on David Letterman’s Late Show

Apple’s lost iPhone, also known as the iPhone HD, has officially became a national joke, thanks to David Letterman who touched the subject on his Late Show late Wednesday.

Running through a quick list of the top ten excuses for a guy who lost a secret prototype of Apple’s fourth-generation iPhone, Letterman poked fun at what has exploded into the biggest tech leak of 2010, maybe even a decade. Here’s the complete list accompanied by an embedded clip from the show.

“Couldn’t call Apple for help because I lost my iPhone”

“I’m more of a Kindle guy?”

“You mean besides being drunk out of my mind?”

“Distraught Kate Gosselin kicked off ‘Dancing with the Stars'”

“Thought there was an app that would wisk it back to my house”

“It must have fallen out of my iPants”

“Volcanic Ash! Run!”

“Let’s just blame Goldman Sachs”

“At least I didn’t lose my finger like that iPad guy”

“It didn’t work anyway – it uses AT&T”

Gizmodo outed the Apple engineer that lost an iPhone HD in a bar in Redwood City as Gray Powell, a North Carolina State University graduate that Apple hired as a software engineer on the iPhone baseband software.

Gizmodo’s follow-up story explained that Powell was celebrating his 27th birthday on March 18 in a bar. A few hours and a couple of pints later, Powell left the bar, leaving the iPhone HD on a barstool. At first, nobody paid notice because the phone was wrapped in an iPhone 3GS lookalike plastic case, the standard measure companies use to conceal prototype gear romaing in the wild.

Another person eventually spotted the device and left it with another party that wanted to return it to Powell, but he never showed up. The next day, a guy from that group in the possession of the device phoned Apple’s support, realizing this phone was anything but ordinary. Needless to say, the support assumed it was a prank call and didn’t bother notifying Apple’s management. The guy then allegedly sold the device to Gizmodo for $5,000.

You know the rest of this story, Gizmodo has returned the phone upon the request of its rightful owner. Of course, that’s Gizmodo’s official line. Some conspiracy theorists, this author included, think it was a meticulously plotted leak that has eventually resulted in tons of free press for both Apple and Gizmodo. It benefited both Apple and Gizmodo without revealing anything substantial about the next iPhone that couldn’t be logically assumed based on the rumors.